


Fire in the air

by insensible



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-22
Updated: 2016-01-22
Packaged: 2018-05-15 13:13:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5786482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/insensible/pseuds/insensible
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What goes through Poe Dameron's mind when Kylo Ren goes through his mind. </p>
<p>Short. </p>
<p>There'll be more...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fire in the air

There is a great deal of pain, now, and he tries to push it far away. He considers his life. How what he has tested, over and over again, like the edge of a thumb on a knife-blade, is how far he can go without breaking. He thinks of all the ships he’s flown and pushed to the very edge of tolerance. He’d been warned, plenty times. But he never let himself consider, ever, that what he was doing was seeking death. And here it is. And it is taking forever. Ren is faceless and the air is cold and he’s pinned like a butterfly in the dark, heart burning with slow ice, and there’s something like a riptide pulling at his mind and sweat has run into his eyes. He can’t see clearly. He can’t think clearly. Time is stretching horribly. He remembers all his hard landings, hell, crashes, some his fault – mostly his fault -and how in every one of them time slowed like this, like it is doing right now, giving him time to work out what to do to survive, to _win._ He’s always been lucky, and he’s always been good. He’s been better than good. He’s been the best.

But he has no ship, there is no ship, and all he can move is his head and he’s not sure it’s his own any more.He’s on a sickening glide path towards extinction, engines flamed out, nothing restarting. Walls are crumbling in Dameron’s mind. He cannot shore them up. Behind the waves of agony is a great and empty sadness. _Not here. Not like this._ He’d expected to end in a trail of bright fire, a line in the fading sky, warm cinders buried in earth or scattered on cold interstellar winds. 

_Get out get out get OUT_ he shouts into his own mind, and his head slams back, hard, blood flooding his mouth, then his skull is pulled forward again by something as inevitable as a gravity well that’s set itself up inside him, wrenching at him, delighting in it, causing damage as it goes, snapping and burning consequences and hopes and leaving him with a taste of terror and ash. It is looking for something he mustn’t let it have. He must _not._ He clings in desperation to inconsequential details, the smallest things, the stitching on the edge of his bunk-berth pillow, the shape of buttons between his fingers … then the drawstring bag slips helplessly into his mind, pressed into his hand a few hours ago — and like sand through fingers all those memories fall away. They aren’t his any more. He hears a scream and feels his throat burn as it rises, and he retches. He knows Ren has it: has felt the click of the memory device dropping to safety. Has felt his love for that little rolling droid. Smelt the blood and smoke and fire and fear.

Then he’s just scrap, falling. Parts of himself recede into the dim distance. He feels a sudden, burning anger. To feel nothing but regret—this is a bad way to die. There should be something to hold on to, something to fight for, even in defeat—and as pale lights flicker and dance behind his closed eyes, all he can see, in his mind, is the crackling, hissing blue of the blaster bolt he’d fired at Ren, that strip of burning light held in suspension. It was beautiful. Part of him had thrilled at the damn craziness of it, the impossible physics, the exquisite, seething nonsense of it. Absolute wonder at it just hanging there in the night air had turned his head and made him, just for a moment, forget the savage fist in the gut, the knowledge of where he was being dragged and what would happen when he got there. _The blaster_ he murmurs, inaudibly, to no-one and everyone. He’s losing consciousness but he _knows_ something.There’s a truth to it that is all of a sudden the only certainty he has left, bar death. The blaster shot … it was _important_. More important than anything. But not that one. Not the one that burned in the air. The earlier one, the shot that brought down a stormtrooper. Why it is important is beyond him. He doesn’t care. It is enough that he knows. And something like that old Poe Dameron gleeful laughter echoes in some untouched part of him as the crash comes and he slams down into darkness.


End file.
